Transporting food generates whopping amounts of carbon dioxide
nature.com
nature.com
Basically, they make up a non-standard definition of food miles to include everything like fertilizers, pesticides and machinery.
Emissions from food transport are negligible for most foods (except for foods that is transported by planes for long distances, because of very short shelf life, but that's rarely the case) [0].
The best way to cut GHG emissions from food is and will always be to cut out meat and dairy.
0: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#foo...
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
> If we want to count these emissions from moving fertilizers, tractors etc. around as 'food miles' then the logical conclusion would not be 'eat local'.
> Instead, 'eat from countries that manufacture fertilisers & pesticides' so they don't have to export elsewhere.
When I walk to the farmer's market by my house, I always shudder at all the cars that have driven there and parked. The quantity of emissions from driving a personal gasoline vehicle is really staggering compared to any food related emissions.
And it's really shocking that people are so ignorant of the toll their personal vehicles take. I think that if people had to manually lift all the fuel that they pumped into their cars, maybe even for one filling per year, they would get a better feel for just how bad driving is. And the CO2 is far heavier than even the fuel, pre combustion. A 20 gallon refill of a tank is 400 pounds of CO2, a fifth of a ton.
If we even legalized corner stores for US neighborhoods, we could probably start driving down emissions.
I've tried biking to supermarkets in America but the closest has always been like 30 minutes away, and I need to have a crate just to sanely carry a decent amount to feed my family.
May not be representative, but it was sure nice always having fresh food nearby.
Yep, striking zoning laws to allow markets in residential neighborhoods would do wonders - having markets within biking or walking distance on low traffic roadways or via separated paths.
1. Your claim that people are ignorant is not well supported by the presence of cars at a farmers market.
2. Assuming people are ignorant, why would that be shocking? It's a complex system at work and it's hard to comorehend the effect of a single person's decisions, even if you're an expert.
Long term we could live in more dense and walkable neighborhoods, but even if we did the zoning changes, it would take decades to swap out all of our infrastructure for a less car dependent built environment.
Short term we could have electric cars. But 60% of our power grid is still fossil fuel driven [1]. Plus electric cars are built with 50% more plastic than ICE cars [2]. Exxon, without selling gasoline, expects to make as much money from petrochemicals as the company as a whole made in 2013 [3].
We really have significant issues, they’re not easily solved. But telling people that they make a lot of carbon is not going to change behavior. There are deeply rooted structures that influence behavior. They can be changed, but they will take a long time and alternatives are needed.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
[2] https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/the-green...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/25/exxon-mobil-ceo-all-new-pass...
That means walkable neighborhoods, which would exist if they weren't blocked by law.
My city, which claims to be lefty, takes great pains to talk about taking climate actions, but takes even greater pains to avoid the numbers that would show that city planning laws and codes and zoning must adapt.
I have been fighting like mad to try to make even small changes to this, but the Overton window remains firmly closed.
EVs are only a partial solution. We should legalize housing and markets and jobs and all sorts of buildings that are accessible without requiring cars.
The bigger problem is not innumeracy, but ignorance, and also a willingness to prioritize short term personal gain over their stated values. It would be a lot easier if everyone was honest and upfront, but I am not so naive as to believe that many people are arguing their true beliefs in my local political arena. Instead people say whatever has the best chance of effecting their desired outcome.
https://culinarylore.com/food-history:aw-1-3-pound-burger-fa...
Yep. Good. Not doing it. What's next on the list?
I think if your plan to reduce problematic gasses in the atmosphere is to encourage mass dietary change, I don't think that's a realistic plan. Hence, next idea please.
This could enable people during certain times of the year to eat food that is local, fresher, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly.
I know a lot of people that have personal gardens but don't grow much since it's too time consuming for them.
What would it cost to hire a part-time gardener now?
How does this end well?
I'm not talking about a specific type of apple, but just things like green beans that are exported here to Germany (for example) and that we import green beans from Columbia for internal consumption.
Build the vertical farms in cities and skip the CO2 intensive process of transportation from the traditional farm to the grocery store/distributor/farmers market.
Imagine living in a building where a vertical farm exists below grade. Retail, restaurants, and bodegas on the street level. Finally, residences and commercial in the upper floors.
Literally straight from “farm” to table.
One thing that does occur to me is that artificial lighting wouldn't be limited by the passage of the sun, so crop growth could potentially continue 24 hours a day.
I have other resources should you wish and I ton of personal experience. I have 3 Hydroponic systems (1 off the shelf, 2 custom designed by me) and 2 Aquaponics systems. The custom ones took 3 months to recoup the costs of materials vs the cost of produce, though the liquid fertilizer is a cost and input that I don't love. I've switched most of my effort to Aquaponics (Aquaculture - raising fish, which provides a natural fertilizer), I have 1 microsetup growing herbs and microgreens that has been running for 1 year. Only inputs are water and fish food, I clean it 1 once every 3 months since the plants act as a natural filter to clean the water.
It's extremely costly to provide sufficient light to grown plants, as photosynthesis isn't terribly efficient. Natural sunlight is significantly stronger than what people tend to expect.
Not only that, but you would need to move massive amounts of air to keep the plants happy, plus the humidity from being underground and all the water they need. Beyond that, you need to go quite a bit underground to feed a sufficient number of people, which isn't always feasible depending on the type of soil and water table, etc
Final note, most plants do better not getting 24 hours of light. They can only grow just so fast and need to photosynthesize just so much.
That's a lot of work (meaning higher prices for people who need to eat) for very little gain.
https://sustainabledish.com/vertical-farms-thermodynamic-non...
"It turns out it would take about 4.5 acres of solar cells for every one acre of plant growth space" well that implies that the 100x efficiency factor has actually been met for lettuce but jaegerpicker didn't seem too keen on telling you. The obvious problem though is that solar panels are only 20% efficient hence roughly 5 acres of solar per 1 acre of vertical farming grow space.
As for LED grow lights, you typically use about 30-40 watts / square foot. That's a not insignificant added cost compared to growing above ground.
The added challenges to growing underground simply make it irrational.
One is being built minutes from my house https://verticalharvestfarms.com/locations/westbrook-maine/
Also The Netherlands are leading the world at this type of farming, here is a short video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-lan...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
PPFD is a measure of photosynthetic active radiation, PAR for short. PAR is not a measure of anything itself but is more of a description. PAR light is all the visible wavelengths of light which cause photosynthesis, found within the 400-700 nanometer range. PPFD is a ‘spot’ measurement that tells you how many photons from the PAR range hit a specific area of your canopy over time. It is expressed as micro moles per square meter per second (μmol/m2/s). For this reason, PPFD is the most accurate measure of light power. First, unlike other measures, it considers the entire spectrum of light that plants see. PPFD also takes into account the amount of light that will actually reach the plant instead of focusing only on the point of origin. A light source can be very bright and powerful, but if it is too away from the plant, or obstructed in some way, the plant won’t be getting all the light it needs for photosynthesis. PPFD controls for this kind of inaccuracy.
With LED's you can place the plants much closer to the light source and control the color spectrum along with the obstructions 24/7. It allows you to grow indoors at an extremely efficient rate. Your formula has almost nothing to do with indoor farming.
https://www.freightfarms.com/blog/indoor-grow-lights#:~:text....
Here are some additional sources: https://archipel.uqam.ca/1619/1/1998_025_Gendron.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1066711/pdf/pln... https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Hanson7/publicatio... https://www.horti-growlight.com/en-gb/par-ppf-ypf-ppfd-dli#:.... https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
Quick summary: PPFD measures the amount of light wavelengths that the plant captures that kicks off the chemical reaction of Chlorophyll. Red and Blue lights are the vast majority of wavelengths that interact with Chlorophyll. That's a major reason why the solar irradiance measure of pure Wattage is irrelevant.
The math that shows how much electricity must go in to have the equivalent amount of plants come out.
Watt per PPFD or something along those lines.
Vertical farming uses a lot of electricity.
>You need light coverage not heat wattage!
The 100x efficiency factor already implies that the plant can absorb heat for photosynthesis. None of that "heat wattage" is being wasted.
He already abstracted over that by using efficiency.
>none of the math you did matters at all.
One would have expected an increase in coverage to increase efficiency by 10 vs sunlight which would have require explaining another factor 10 which could have been explained by e.g. saying that converting useless wavelengths into useful wavelengths increased efficiency by 10.
You're arguing that the things you have said do not increase efficiency. That is even more damning than a ridiculous efficiency gain.
>That's a major reason why the solar irradiance measure of pure Wattage is irrelevant
You are quite literally missing the tree for the forest. Parent assumes that photosynthesis is 1% efficient with sunlight so he added the 100 factor to estimate how much energy plants would need if photosynthesis was 100% efficient and you could skip photosynthesis just feed plants energy straight from the power grid and on top of that he is assuming you can turn 100% of solar radiance into electricity.
If we assume 20% efficient solar panels your growing lights need to be 500 times more effective or power efficient than sunlight.
You should have based your argument on arguing that the vast majority of acres that the parent used are e.g. suitable for solar panels but not for farming plants and hence the number of acres is unfairly bloated. But all I see is excuses in trying to tell people how your growing lights are going to be 500 times more efficient when we know that isn't going to happen.
Perhaps even worse than the energy requirements of animal agriculture is its land use. Today, a staggering 50% of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, of which 77% is used for animals (this does include arable land used to grow fodder) [2].
(By comparison, pre-industrial society used ~4% of habitable land for farming. Of course, we’re far more numerous so we couldn’t expect to revert to that now.)
Vertical farming is most surely not the solution. We just need to end the grotesque industrial slaughter that we’ve become utterly perversely normalized to.
There is more than enough land on Earth for us all to eat in abundance, just not on omnivorous diets.
Where do you think the vast majority of calories come from in most of the world? Grain and vegetables. 20% of the world's calories come from just rice alone.
The problem is mostly cattle, and it's not just "energy." They require massive amounts of land, fertilizer, and water to raise compared to even other forms of protein:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-...
> The team calculated that beef requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer and 11 times more water compared to those other food sources. That adds up to about five times more greenhouse gas emissions.
> To further put these findings into perspective, the authors also ran the same calculations for several staple crops. All told, on a calorie-to-calorie basis, potatoes, wheat and rice require two to six time less resources to produce than pork, chicken, eggs or dairy.
So that means that calories from beef require about sixty to one hundred and eighty times as much land, twelve to thirty six times more fertilizer, and twenty two to sixty six times more water.
Look at how much rice you can buy for the cost of a 1lb of the cheapest form of beef - ground - and compare the calories per dollar.
1lb of ground beef is a little under $5 and provides at most 784 calories. 156 calories per dollar. 1lb of rice is around 25-30 seconds per pound. Let's round up to 50 cents to make it sporting. 589 calories per pound (also, 12g of protein.) 1178 calories per dollar.
Rice provides almost eight times as many calories per dollar. Now consider that beef in the US is heavily subsidized (because...drumroll please...it wouldn't be price competitive with other food sources!)
I feed my chickens other (dead) chickens. They seem to love it and still taste the same.
Vertical farms just don't add up very well. You either use same land for more traditional growing, even greenhouses or replace it with solar panels... And then there is energy input of building those farms. Probably out of reinforced concreate.